Fran Farquhar of Academics Without Borders with some of her students at Kibagabaga school in Rwanda.

OTTAWA — Good universities are crucial to a nation’s advancement, and this is especially true in the world’s least developed countries. Higher education provides citizens with the skills and knowledge needed to become productive citizens, competent professionals, and successful entrepreneurs; and university research generates the knowledge needed to solve social problems, stimulate technological advancements, and drive economic development.

However, good universities do not emerge overnight. They are complex institutions whose capacity must be developed and nurtured carefully over time. Many countries lack the resources to achieve this. So some send their students abroad for higher education, but this often backfires through “brain drain.” Their youth remain overseas and their home countries derive no benefit from their education.

Enter Academics Without Borders Canada (AWBC), a bi-lingual non-governmental organization, established in 2007. Its mission is to support developing countries improve their universities so that they can educate at home the professionals these countries need for their development. AWBC works through academic experts, many of them Canadian, although academics from several other countries have participated. These experts volunteer their time to work on projects with their colleagues in developing countries to help establish and improve the quality of sustainable programs and services. The projects have focused on a number of areas, including, health, teaching and learning methodology, various academic disciplines, student services, and back-office operations, as well as preparing strategic plans and overhauling organizational structures.

A number of the AWBC volunteers have come from the Ottawa region, especially Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. A recent example that is apt during this 20th anniversary of Rwanda’s tragic genocide is the engagement of Robin Farquhar, Carleton’s former president, who is also a University of Winnipeg president emeritus. He served for five months as a strategic adviser to the Rwandan ministry of education in restructuring the country’s higher education system. Along with Anthony Morgan, a former vice president at the University of Utah, Farquhar developed a plan for implementing the Rwandan’s government’s decision to merge its seven higher education institutions into a single national university, the University of Rwanda, with comprehensive offerings, several campuses and quality programs, while keeping costs within reach of the Rwandan budget.

Farquhar is now on AWBC’s Board of Directors, as are Caroline Andrew, former Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa, and Caroline Pestieau, former Vice President, Programs and Partnership at the International Development Research Centre, and a former Senior Fellow of the Centre on Governance and of the School of International Development and Globalization Studies at the University of Ottawa.

While he was thus involved with the University of Rwanda, Farquhar’s wife, Fran, joined Anthony’s wife, Mary Ann, as volunteers in a nearby village school, teaching music, art, and English. They taught the children to play violins and recorders, which they had never seen, to design snowflakes, also unfamiliar in this equatorial country, and to improve their English, recently replacing French as the language of instruction in Rwanda’s schools.

Other projects that AWBC has undertaken to develop higher education in Rwanda include Carol Dence, who held administrative and faculty positions at Carleton and the University of Ottawa, and Gudrun Currie’s work to assist the National University of Rwanda to upgrade its registrar’s office, Don Cherry’s to help the University establish a Master’s degree in accounting, and Corrie Young’s to aid some of the staff at the University to improve their administrative skills.

AWBC has engaged Ottawa area experts in helping the universities of other developing countries as well. For example, Arch Ritter, a Carleton professor emeritus, who also served on AWBC Board, assisted in introducing new courses in economics at the University of Liberia, and Ozay Mehmet, also a Carleton professor emeritus, helped the University’s School of Business to upgrade its research capacity. In addition, the AWBC’s founder and Executive Director, Steven Davis, is a Carleton professor emeritus.

Since 2014, AWBC has done 50 projects in 14 countries and is practically the only non-governmental organization worldwide to assist developing countries improve their universities. It is currently helping set up an Academics without Borders in the U.S., is working with Universitaires sans frontières in France, is exploring creating AWBs in other countries and is considering establishing an AWB International.

Steven Davis is executive director of Academics without Borders Canada

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